Deeplinks Blog posts about Online Behavioral Tracking

If we ask whether a fact about a person identifies that person, it turns out that the answer isn't simply yes or no. If all I know about a person is their ZIP code, I don't know who they are. If all I know is their date of birth, I don't know who they are. If all I know is their gender, I don't know who they are. But it turns out that if I know these three things about a person, I could probably deduce their identity! Each of the facts is partially identifying.

We're excited to share the news that our friends at the ACLU of Northern California have just launched their dotRights privacy campaign, an impressive effort to spread the word about how online services collect and share reams of personal information about internet users. The entertaining and informative dotRights introductory video summarizes the issue, covering how companies can collect data about you and share that information with data brokers and the government, and how the laws meant to protect the privacy of your internet activities are woefully outdated.

This post is Part 2 of a series on user tracking on the web today. You can read Part 1 here and Part 3 here.

3rd party advertising and tracking firms are ubiquitous on the modern web. When you visit a webpage, there's a good chance that it contains tiny images or invisible JavaScript that exists for the sole purpose of tracking and recording your browsing habits. This sort of tracking is performed by many dozens of different firms. In this post, we're going to look at how this tracking occurs, and how it is being combined with data from accounts on social networking sites to build extensive, identified profiles of your online activity.

This is part 1 of a three-part series on user tracking on the web today. You can read Part 2 here.

Cookies are still a privacy problem for web users, many years after privacy advocates first raised concerns about their use to track web browsing. Today, cookies are one of the main mechanisms that advertising companies like Google use to track and profile users across sites and over time -- often building up a single gigantic profile for years and years. Many EFF members respond to this threat by using their browsers' cookie management features to limit which cookies they'll accept or how long they'll be retained.